Peter Brook died at the age of 97. He was a creative film and theatre director known for his groundbreaking modifications of classic works of literature and for bringing important non-Western impacts into the theatre world. BBC said that the news was true.
Throughout most of the 20th century, Brook was always thought of as one of the most important theatre directors. He was born in London in 1925, and in the 1940s, he started directing Shakespeare plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain.
He quickly became known for his willingness to try new things with classic texts like operas and Christopher Marlowe’s plays. In the 1960s, several of Brook’s shows moved to Broadway. In the early 1970s, he moved to Paris.
He started an experimental theatre group called the International Centre for Theatre Research. This group went all over Africa and the Middle East to work on theatre pieces with local artists.
As time went on, he started to try new things in his productions and make them bigger. One of his most famous pieces was “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour theatre production of the Indian national epic that was known for using puppets to tell a story that many people thought couldn’t be staged or filmed.
Brook did well in the theatre, but he also did well as a film director. He tried to win the Palme d’Or 2 times at the Cannes Film Festival, first with “Moderato Cantabile” in 1960 and then with “Lord of the Flies” in 1963.
In 1979, he was the director of the movie “Meetings With Remarkable Men.” Throughout the rest of his career, he mostly focused on putting his stage plays into film, for which he won two Emmys. In 1984, “La Tragédie de Carmen,” which he directed, won him his first Emmy. In 1990, “The Mahabharata,” which he directed for TV, won him an International Emmy.
Brook continued to direct plays until the end of his life. He kept directing shows in Paris with his longtime partner Marie-Hélène Estienne. Most recently, he put on new shows like “Why?,” “The Prisoner,” and “The Tempest Project.” He was married to actress Natasha Parry for 64 years until she died in 2015. Brook leaves behind her husband and two children.
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